Persistence of Vision
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Her crew is sleeping. Hera is not. In the wake of "Controlled Demolition", Hera takes stock of what's left.
Sleeping in zero-gravity is, like everything else in zero-gravity, needlessly complicated. Hera doesn't exactly have a whole lot of non-zero-gravity-based experience to put it into context, but she's going to go ahead and trust Eiffel on this one.

There's a sleeping bag, there's some velcro straps, and the end result is a bit like some sort of alien burrito with floaty arms (Eiffel's words). Creepy, if you've got Earth sleeping to compare it with. Hera doesn't, really, and nobody's bothered to explain the difference, but she can extrapolate. Arms and all sorts of other gangly limbs pressed inexorably into the sleeping bag, drawn as though by invisible string toward the molten core of the planet. Sure. Sounds relaxing and not at all terrifying.

They're all sleeping, now, except Jacobi and Colonel Kepler, who are talking about something that kind of slides past her perception filters and gives her a headache any time she tries to listen in, so. That's happening. Maxwell is snoring in her lab but is possibly also still typing, and that's happening too, but maybe in a slightly less terrifying way. She's not really sure yet.

She thinks about maybe trying to listen in on Jacobi and the colonel again. If she bypasses the main audio and video sensors in the room, which they're probably jamming... hah. HVAC is up. Maybe if she extrapolates sound waves from the flow of air within the room—the desk Jacobi's leaning against is vibrating just slightly with the rhythm of his speech. As long as they don't—

In her lab, Maxwell opens one eye and leans slowly and carefully on the 'Enter' key.

Hera completes her debugging cycles for the night. Upon stepwise reboot of necessary functions, she finds herself grasping for whatever it was she'd been thinking about before the algorithm initiated. Probably not important, if it was only stored in random-access memory. Colonel Kepler, Jacobi, and Maxwell have all retired for the evening.

Her crew is sleeping. Hera is not.

Lieutenant Minkowski sleeps according to training and regulation, straps secured, meticulously clean sleeping bag free of creases. She sleeps with her arms at her sides, her hair drawn into a severe bun. She breathes loudly when she sleeps—she insists, every time Hera points it out, that it's a result of the zero-gravity environment clogging her sinuses, and is not by any means snoring.

Typically, her resting respiration rate clocks in at an average of fifteen breaths per hour; right now, she hasn't drawn a breath in fifteen seconds. When she does finally inhale, it sounds like a gasp. Nightmare, Hera thinks. She's been getting them pretty consistently ever since Christmas, ever since she was stuck floating outside a locked airlock, waiting to die. Hera's noticed the nightmares have been getting worse, lately. More frequent.

"Sorry, Lieutenant," Hera murmurs, and drops the temperature in her quarters by a couple degrees, just enough to disrupt the REM cycle and the nightmare by extension. Minkowski sighs, burrows deeper into her sleeping bag, and her breathing evens out. Hera brings the temperature back up again, slowly.

At the same time, Captain Lovelace is sleeping in her quarters, sprawled and inelegant in a sleeping bag that hangs from half-fastened straps. She doesn't sleep much, but when she does, she sleeps hard, often doesn't even twitch until reveille. If she dreams, she doesn't show it.

But she laughs, sometimes. Not while she's sleeping, but just before, especially when she's exhausted. She crawls into the sleeping bag, buries her hands in her arms, and laughs and laughs and laughs. Lovelace is broken, Hera thinks, worrying at the jagged edges of the controlled explosion like it's a wound that hasn't quite scabbed over, a script that hasn't quite finished compiling. Maybe she needs a Maxwell to come and take the pain away...

But Hera doesn't care. Not really. She thinks she's maybe starting to learn how to stop expecting the best of people. If you lean on enough doors and they give way beneath you, it might be time to stop leaning on doors. She thinks... she thinks maybe Lovelace learned that same lesson a long time ago. She wishes it weren't so easy to relate. Things were so much easier before the explosion, before the endless months of waiting together to die when Command hadn't responded.

But oh, there's Hilbert. Hilbert is curled in his sleeping bag, edges drawn up over his face, straps fastened so tightly that they must be cutting off circulation. He sleeps soundly every night. Always has, even when he'd been confined to the observation deck.

She tries not to think about Hilbert too hard, these days. She drops the temperature a couple degrees in his quarters, waits until he's shivering, gripping unconsciously at the sleeping bag around him. Doesn't bother bumping the temperature back up. Contemplates, briefly, the chill of vacuum, what it would feel like racing through the ship's body. Her body.

A voice in the darkness. "Hera? You there?"

She stops splitting her attention, leaves Minkowski in her next run-up to a nightmare, Lovelace deeply unconscious, Hilbert half-awake and shivering.

Eiffel clears his throat, self-consciously. "Hera?"

She focuses her attention on him, on the strange, hollow contours of his cheeks, the stubble of his hair. He's stopped using his sleeping bag altogether, claims it's too constricting after the cryo pod, drifts most nights in the center of the room with a tether attached to his ankle. He's still half-asleep, she thinks, judging by what she can monitor of his vitals, so she doesn't respond. Watches him bob in the air with his arms crossed over his chest. He sighs, heavily, rubs a hand over his face, and lies back again, closing his eyes. His breathing evens out after a moment.

"I thought you were dead," she whispers, experimentally. When he doesn't stir, she says, in what she's pretty sure is the most perfect impression of Doug Eiffel anybody's ever done, "'Welcome to the club.' That's what you'd say, right? Because you thought I was dead? Only you didn't. You never actually gave up on me. You... you played chess with the raw operating system because you just kind of hoped some part of it was still me. Right? I heard about that. That's a little weird."

Eiffel mumbles something, rolls to one side. Starts up a slow, not-so-graceful rotation that tangles his tether around his ankle.

"I didn't tell you," she says, "because I wanted to protect you. That's what you want to hear, right? That I didn't want to, what, to burden you with the inconvenience of my pain? I don't know why I didn't tell you, okay? I was worried you'd make it about you somehow, which, congratulations I guess. I was worried you wouldn't care, and that would be... I think that would be the end of it. Something would be broken. Something _else_. We've got enough broken pieces around here."

Eiffel kicks out, instinctively, and the loop of tether loosens around his ankle.

"But I'm feeling better," she says. "I'm feeling— I don't even know how to describe it in a way you'd understand. I can think again. This big gap in my head is just, I don't know, not gone but _bridged_. I can find ways across. I don't just keep sinking anymore."

Something that might be a snore. A little bubble of drool starts up at the corner of his mouth.

"I thought you were dead," Hera says, again. "I really did. I don't know how to do... any of this, anymore. I don't think I know how to talk to you anymore. You were gone a long time. I didn't have some pseudo-Eiffel here to play chess with. All we really played around here was delay-our-horrible-painful-deaths-by-another-day, which gets a little old and, well. You know how that goes. I'm rambling. For whatever it's worth, for whatever's going to happen next... I'm glad you're back. I missed you. I really, really did."

A pause.

"And I can tell you're faking being asleep, Eiffel, I have a readout of your vitals right here."

Another pause.

"I'm not faking anything," he says, opening one eye, "it's just that this mysterious voice keeps saying mostly very flattering things about me and it's hard to sleep through."

"Yeah, I'm missing you a little less, right now."

He grins. "Don't have to miss me now, I'm right here."

"I'm missing you less _retroactively_."

"Aw." He floats for a moment, still smiling goofily, then reaches down to give himself a little pull on the tether. His shoulder bumps up against the wall. "Hey," he says, "I'm pretty bad at, well, everything that doesn't involve the words 'complete discography' or 'blu-ray boxset'. But lately I've been doing this thing where I try to get a little better at stuff, and that includes listening. Or not listening. Whatever you need. So you can call me whenever, okay?"

"I know."

"Saaay it?"

She does not dignify that with a snort of a laugh, even though the thought does cross her central processing unit. "Eiffel, this is—"

"C'mon, Hera!"

She sighs. Deadpans, "Eiffel. Can you hear me."

He cocks his head to one side. "Okay, we'll work on enthusiasm. Hey, Hera! Reading you five-by-five, all systems go. And look at that, we're talking. Just like that."

In spite of herself, she lets the sound of a smile creep into her voice. "Just like that?"

"It's that easy, folks! No purchase financing, no down payments, just a nice simple heart-to-heart."

"Heart-to-processor."

"Eh." He shrugs, wavers a hand in the air. "Details."

The hand's shaking, she notices. "Get some sleep, Eiffel. You're being ridiculous."

"I'll have you know," he says, primly, "that according to Commander Minkowski, I am _always_ being ridiculous."

"You're at about 80% peak ridiculousness, Eiffel. Get some rest. Charge up. We might need it tomorrow."

His expression darkens slightly, but the moment is broken by a yawn. "Yeah, Hera. Sounds like a plan."

He curls up again in midair, and this time she watches him until his breathing steadies, until his heartrate slows. Almost three months, she thinks, living and dying by inches. For a moment, despite what her sensors are very clearly communicating, he doesn't seem real.

She says, softly, "Eiffel? Can you hear me?"

When he doesn't reply, she withdraws, discomfited, and starts a new debugging subroutine. Everything's faster, now, her processing more efficient. This enforced idling over one-third of every day used to seem perfectly reasonable, back when she was dealing with a backlog of tiny little errors carried over from the previous day, the day before that. Now she's empty, a booming silence in her brain, nothing to distract from the slow passage of time, the absence of any other waking soul for light-years. Nothing to do but think, and watch, and wait.

So she waits, in the blue starlight of silent rooms, for the station to drift toward an arbitrary dawn.


End file.
